Working, working!

It's funny. I thought writing the book would be the hardest part. Actually, compared to my usual writing process, writing it was the easiest bit of all.

Right now I'm struggling with my whole "marketing" thing. I'm not very good at it, truth be told, and I've never been that great at generating a following.

I've spent the past several hours scouring some stock image sites for cover images. I found a couple I really, really like, but the licensing agreements are so confusing I have no idea if I can afford them or not. Luckily I have a professional in my corner, and she's the one who has to figure that all out.  :)  Since she does it for a living, unlike me, I have every confidence.

What else? Oh, ya, plagued by self-doubt about the book itself. Still doing re-writes, even though at this point I know I should leave it the hell alone. Is there enough chemistry between the main leads? Do I introduce too many minor characters too fast? Is it readable? Are the characters three dimensional beings with flaws and problems and likeability? On and on.

I haven't heard back from any of the review sites I emailed, but I'm being patient. I'm sure they get a lot of emails. Also, my book cover designer said she'd ask around to see if any of her author friends would be able to do a review. And then there's the nice folks over at Famous Five; they'll help me out with that, too.

I'm a panicker. It's just who I am. I need to calm down right now, because honestly everything is going well. I have my book cover design in extremely capable hands. I've got feelers out all over the place about reviews/marketing. And, on top of all that, it's still a month until I'm planning to release! I have plenty of time.

Just mark this, dear blogledites: this is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Make sure you have plenty of time, energy, and...stress to spare.

Sisyphean.

The idea I've had for the novella has gone nowhere. I have to get back into the groove of writing. I was writing at least 2k words/day, and if I did skip a day, I instead did a bunch of editing, formatting, or rearranging. In that spirit, I've spent the last few hours formatting the Word document for Smashwords upload.

I wasn't at all happy about it before I started. I wrote the whole thing in Pages (yes, I have a Mac), and I had it beautifully formatted for an ebook. Pages lets you export as an epub, which is fantastic for previewing.

So imagine my consternation when I realized Smashwords doesn't accept beautifully formatted epub files, but only Word files! I don't have Word. I have Pages. Le sigh. I downloaded the free trial of Office just for this purpose, and I don't know what I'm gonna do if it takes me longer than 30 days to write the novella. Use one of the computers on the floor at work? *snicker* Right...

I've resigned myself to the situation now. I did as the style guide suggested in an attempt to enter page breaks between my chapter headings. In case they don't work I have these dandy little things:

~*~*~

Eh. Better than nothing, right? I don't have the money for an ISBN, and w/o an ISBN I can't get into the iBooks store. Smashwords provides ISBNs to people who get accepted into their Premium catalog. I don't see why I wouldn't, since I followed the stye guide perfectly. I'm very anal about formatting anyway. I want things to look pretty. Oh well. At least the Kindle and Nook editions will preserve my original formatting.

That's all for now, kids; gotta get ready for work!

Oh Crap

Here's something you may or may not know about me, blogledites: I am a crazy person. Yes, it's true, and I'll tell you why.

As I'm sure you all know by now, I just finished my first book. It was 97k words and quite a few years in the making. So what genius plan do I have now? I'm going to write a novella. Yeah. Right on top of finishing the novel, I'm diving back in for about 40k more words. My plan is to release the novella first, for free, to get people interested. And then they're more likely to spend hard cash for the book. See?! It's actually a pretty smart plan.

Too bad it means I have to actually write the damn novella, and make it damn good, too. I just exhausted my brain on the book. I don't know if there's anything left!

But I have an idea for it. A pretty good idea. It would be a sort-of prequel...but not exactly...and it would have some of the same characters as the book, but not all.

Ok. I'm gonna quit chattering to this empty room and go write something productive.

Where are you going...? Know it, I do!

Where are you going to!?

Yeah, okay. For those of you who aren't old school mega-geeks like me, that was a King's Quest 6 reference. It was pretty bitchin' back in the day, and it was the first game I ever played on CD-ROM; that is, the first game that ever actually TALKED to me! I played it so many times I can still hear certain lines in my head. "Don't just wander, Alexander; let your conscious be your guide."

Right, moving on...

A friend of mine sent me a link to Patrick Rothfuss' blog (If you don't know who Patrick Rothfuss is, stop reading this right now. Go find one of his books. Read it. Read the second one. Come back.) in which the author instructs a first-time fantasy writer in the fine art of not showing your hand too early. Don't pile on the info so fast that your reader gets bored and wanders off, in other words.

It's great advice, and in a fantasy story it's especially important. So how does this advice apply to The Dark Man's Son?

Well, ya see. People ask me (quite often) what my book is about. I, being me, kind of assume they're just being polite and give them a sort of over-simplified version. "Oh, it's a modern urban fantasy with mythological elements. Like, angels and demons and whatnot. Good vs. evil. Ya know." It is all those things, don't get me wrong, but I'm leaving out pretty much...yeah, 99% of "what it's about".

How, then, do I explain that, yes, it's about those things I just said, but also I created this class of being that's unique (not 100% unique, because...eh, Joseph Campbell) to my story. Am I supposed to launch into an entire background spiel? Maybe some people would find that interesting, but other people might be like, "Yeah, um. I was just bein' polite. Thanks, though."

Besides that bit of social awkwardness, Pat's blog sent me into a tailspin of rewrites. In the original (as in, 10 years ago) versions of this story, which are all VASTLY different than the final one, I had long paragraphs basically describing the Guardians' origins, function, history...everything. I had taken most of that out in this story, but I did have a prologue that established some of the story's mythology straight off the bat.

In response to the "don't share too much too soon" advice, I chopped my prologue up into little bits. There's no longer a prologue. Instead, peppered throughout the story, are pieces of the prologue. Like croutons in a salad. Wait: I just said "peppered". Right. So the prologue is now peppered like salad croutons, because I did not mix my metaphors, dammit.

Do I like it better? Yes and no. Yes because I prefer a non-linear style of storytelling anyway, and doing this allowed me to mix the prologue up (like salad dressing) so that the first bits are now middle bits, and the last bits are first bits, and the middle bits are all over. But for the no: I'm not sure I like how I've peppered the croutons throughout my story salad, and maybe it doesn't work at all.

Sigh. Okay, kids. Next entry won't be so much second-guessing. I'm going to try to point you guys towards some of the reference sources I used, because for a modern urban fantasy with mythological elements, I did a helluva lot of historical research.